Habib Khan, a journalist, reports that a friend of his survived an assassination attack today:
Afghanistan has been experiencing a large scale wave of assassinations. Government officials, journalists, medical workers, civil society activists, religious scholars, and other leaders of society are being targeted and killed.
Many of the assassinations have been by sticky bomb — a bomb attached to the victim’s vehicle by magnets.
Bilal Sarwary, a journalist, says there have been three sticky bomb attacks in Kabul just today.
Yesterday, Shaharzad Akbar, chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, noted the two female judges, one a Supreme Court justice, who had been shot and killed in Kabul:
The wave of assassinations began following the negotiated agreement between the United States and the Taliban, last February. In the first half of the year, the New York Times says, the assassinations were mostly in outlying districts and provinces, but they have now emerged in the cities.
The United States and the Taliban had excluded the government of Afghanistan, from the negotiations towards a peace in Afghanistan. The government of Afghanistan, and the people, would have required a ceasefire, as a condition for negotiations. The United States instead settled for a lesser and vague “reduction in violence.”
The agreement between the United States and the Taliban has secret annexes. A New York Times article from last fall, by Mujib Mashal, Fatima Faizi, and Najim Rahim, suggests that the Taliban might have agreed to spare Kabul from the mass-casualty suicide bombings that plagued it, but that the Taliban has now shifted to assassination as a tactic:
Mornings in the city begin with “sticky bombs,” explosives slapped onto vehicles that go up in flames. With night comes the dread of hit-and-run assassinations in the nearby suburbs — government employees shot dead by motorcycle-riding insurgents who roam free.
As peace talks to end Afghanistan’s long war face delays, the Taliban may be sparing Kabul, the capital, from mass-casualty attacks as part of an understanding with the United States. But the insurgents have instead shifted to a tactic that is eroding the Afghan government’s standing with each passing day: frequent targeted assaults that the country’s security forces seem unable to control.
The city has taken on an air of slow-creeping siege.
At least 17 small explosions and assassinations have been carried out in Kabul in the past week, according to a tally by The New York Times. Three magnetic bombs went off within one hour on Saturday morning, and at least two more targeted attacks followed before the end of the day.
Another New York Times article, more recent, by Fahim Abed and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, has a reminder that violence in Afghanistan can come from many directions:
Despite the Taliban’s presumed role in many of the unclaimed attacks, some Afghans are pointing fingers at government-linked factions that could also benefit from the targeted killings, along with the Islamic State affiliate operating in the country.
“Drug smugglers, land grabbers, corrupt officials and those against government reform plans are also behind these attacks,” said Dawlat Waziri, a former Afghan general and military analyst. “They want the peace talks to collapse and even support a civil war, because the more chaos and war in this country, the more they will benefit.”
The current wave of assassinations in Afghanistan gets no more attention, in the United States, than the earlier wave of mass casualty bombings, where the number of deaths sometimes rose to the hundreds.
A double standard is sometimes pointed out, that white terrorists are covered in our media, differently and more sympathetically, than when terrorists are Muslims or persons of color.
There is another double standard, as well, though, and a stronger one. When the victims of terrorism are in Muslim majority or non-Western countries, the terrorism can go almost entirely without notice.
Here again is Shaharzad Akbar, the human rights commissioner, quoted in the same Times article as above. Afghan lives, here in the United States, are just not valued.
Today, what Shaharzad Akbar, the chairwoman of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, fears — aside from being killed — is that these deaths will become white noise for the international community, more so than they already have. Afghan lives, she said, do not seem to be valued by much of the world.